Thursday, February 28, 2013

Paul Auster / Shadow to shadow

Self portrait
by Triunfo Arciniegas
São Paulo / Cemitério da Consolação, 2013


SHADOW TO SHADOW
by Paul Auster

Against the facade of evening:
shadows, fire and silence.
not even silence, but its fire–
the shadow
cast by a breath.
To enter the silence of this wall,
I must leave myself behind.

Self portrait
by Triunfo Arciniegas
São Paulo / Cemitério da Consolação, 2013

Paul Auster
DE SOMBRA A SOMBRA

Contra la fachada del atardecer:
sombras, fuego y silencio.
Ni siquiera silencio, sino su fuego,
la sombra
que arroja un respirar.
Para entrar en el silencio de este muro
Debo dejarme atrás a mí mismo.


Monday, February 25, 2013

Michael Dickman / White Migraine


WHITE MIGRAINE

A NEW POEM

by Michael Dickman
Every color
there ever was
is white

It peels the skin back from the roof of your mouth in metal petals that taste
  like snow

The roof of the world

My fingernails floating in milk

The moon
flushed down
a toilet

Everything I ever wanted glows in the moonlight

Ask him what he wants

I want to be sick and white

and cough up

lilies of the valley

*

The Matterhorn
in my shoulders ruptures
in the toilet

My mouth walks down a hallway in a hospital

Clouds
of bone and cum
in the brainpan

White caviar gets shipped from my brain overseas then scraped out from the backs of my
   eyeballs with beautiful spoons
I can’t throw up anymore

I have to throw up

The mother-of-pearl spoons are tuned razor sharp and sing

It turns out
white can make the world
absolutely clean

*

On all fours the universal position of love is white

Oyster shells
turned over on a bed
of ice

Oyster shells
turned over on a bed
of lice

The white tongues speaking to me now speak in white tongues   

Are you loved?
Are you loved?
Are you loved?

I sit beneath the avalanche and sing

My master
plan

is happiness
Michael Dickman wrote The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Flies(Copper Canyon Press, 2011). He also wrote, with Matthew Dickman, half of 50 American Plays, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.

Believer, May 2012
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201205/?read=poem_dickman

Friday, February 22, 2013

Aurelio Arturo by Gilberto Arturo



Aurelio Arturo and his father


Aurelio Arturo
BIOGRAPHY
By Gilberto Arturo
Translated by Nicolás Suescún


The poetry of Aurelio Arturo is both a world and a frame of mind. It is a dazzling and intimate world revealed through the poet’s sympathy with nature. It is a self-contained, complete universe in which every object is a living being, defined by its relations with the other beings that inhabit the same world.
It is a world closed to signification but open to transcendence: in its identification with the natural world, where animals and plants are one and the same ‘vegetation’; in its identification with the senses – the tactile, the aromas “only for the ear”, the wild, rustic tastes; and with living, vital, interrelated beings, all of them charged with meaning and sentiment.
In Morada al sur (A home in the south) Aurelio Arturo selected what he considered to be his life’s work; the rest, consequently, is conjecture.
His poetry does not describe the interior world of the poet’s own feelings: love flows from the contemplation of the outside world and from the music of the verse. It travels through different frames of mind as it moves through the various landscapes and places of his environment, meeting their inhabitants . . . the birds . . . the leaves.
In the end, he goes so deeply into himself (and the reader) that what flows from inside is a profound sensation of plenitude and peace, of harmony with the world, with nature – a feeling of tranquil and serene joy, not subject to sudden frights or fears. The words of his poems transport us into a world of enchantment and fantasy.
The strength of this poetry does not inspire reverential awe; nor does it derive from playing with words. It is a quiet strength, like that of the grass in his poem “covering footsteps, cities, years”. His poetry is like a fog that imperceptibly and slowly surrounds and covers us. Words pass before our eyes, following each other; and before we realise it, we are immersed and profoundly moved, surrounded by poetry.
Arturo’s is a mysterious poetry; but the mystery is not about something we don’t quite understand and therefore fear, but about what surrounds us, something we feel but do not touch. “In the mestizo nights that rose from the grass/ young horses, shadows, brilliant curves . . .” and “the murmur of date trees in the wind.”
His poetry is concerned with the enjoyment of life and, although it does not deny the setbacks and sadnesses of real life, it takes them and involves them in the deep experience of the moment.



Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Dorianne Laux / The Rising

Dorianne Laux



Dorianne Laux, “The Rising”

The pregnant mare at rest in the field
the moment we drove by decided
to stand up, rolled her massive body
sideways over the pasture grass,
gathered her latticed spine, curved ribs
between the hanging pots of flesh,
haunches straining, knee bones bent
on the bent grass cleaved
astride the earth she pushed against
to life the brindled breast, the architecture
of the neck, the anvil head, her burred mane
tossing flames as her forelegs unlatched in air
while her back legs, buried beneath her belly,
set each horny hoof in opposition
to the earth, a counterweight concentrated there,
and by a willful rump and switch of tail hauled up,
flank and fetlock, her beastly burden, seized
and rolled and wrenched and winched the wave
of her body, the grand totality of herself,
to stand upright in the depth of that field.
The heaviness of gravity upon her.
The strength of the mother.
The Book of Men, the fifth collection of Dorianne Laux’s poems, is the winner of the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize. The book is dedicated to Philip Levine; the poem “Mine Own Phil Levine” originally appeared in Valparaiso Poetry ReviewOrion published “Juneau” (as “Juneau Spring”) and “Roots.” Willow Springs published “Staff Sgt. Metz,” along with a short essay about its creation.
(In 2007, Beatrice featured Laux’s “Moon in the Window.”)

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Paula Bohince / Pinot Noir

Paula Bohince




Paula Bohince, “Pinot Noir”


Drinking deeply on the globe, waiting for blackness
to overtake romance completely,
eyes roaming the faded amphitheater of woods, I breathe in
pine pitch, admire columns of pines everlasting
against the crumbling columns of the burned-down smokehouse,
its three steps leading up to nothingness
but where grass still holds the essence of pig fat
and summer’s adrenaline. Now it’s a stage
for the imagination: my father, seven, feeding his beagle
beer, laughter of the uncles resounding through air
as his pet topples over, lifting its leg to piss, exposing”
its pink and hairless stomach, the child,
at last, approved of, taken in their circle, laughter caught
in the ch-ch-ch-waah of locusts.
The Children is the second collection of Paula Bohince’s poems. “Milkweed” and “Lenox Aubade” appeared in Agni; “Mother’s Quail” was published inThe New Yorker. “Gypsy Moths, or Beloved” appeared in Orion, and “Entering the Ouse” in Poetry. You can hear her reading “Clothesline” atSlate.
In the PIttsburgh City Paper, which is where I found this conveniently already laid-out cover and headshot, Mike Schneider writes, “This is not… Billy Collins, or many other contemporary poets, who generally keep the tone on the light side and the situations familiar. With Bohince, we are drawn into an interior network that at its best sets off Plath-like, compressed-energy depth charges of imagery, but that also can produce the uncomfortable feeling that the poem is a puzzle to solve.”

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/2/




Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Stanley Plumly / Lapsed Meadows

Stanley Plumly



Stanley Plumly, “Lapsed Meadows”

Wild has its skills. the apple grew so close
to the ground it seemed the tree was thicket,
crab, and root, and by fall would look like brush
among the burdock and the hawkweed, as if at heart
it had been cut and piled for burning.
Along the edges, at the corners, like failed fence,
the hawthorns, by comparison, seemed planted.
Everywhere else there was broom grass, timothy,
and wood fern, and sometimes a sapling,
sometimes a run of hazel; sometimes, depending,
fruit still green or grounded and rotting underfoot.
I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature,
lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat
and fireweed and broken sparrow nests,
especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun,
when you could lose yourself by simply lying down.
Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk,
with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused”
with a little wind, filling in for what’s left of the light?
Orphan Hours is the eleventh book of poems by Stanley Plumly; I took this photo of him in 2008, after he’d just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Old Heart. Other poems in this new collection include “Cancer(originally published in The New Yorker), “Afterward” (Kenyon Review), “Vesper Sparrow” (The New Republic), and “Verisimilitude” (The Atlantic). “Amidon Christmas Tree Farm Cardinal” was originally published in The Atlantic as “Cardinal.”
http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/3/




Sunday, February 10, 2013

Peter Gizzi / Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures



Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures
by Peter Gizzi

    Is this what you intended, Vincent
    that we take our rest at the end of the grove
    nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
    saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.
    Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
    this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision
    the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.
    O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
    or if you can indeed hear what I might say
    heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty
    of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.
    To not be naive and think of silly answers only
    nor to imagine answers would be the only destination
    nor is questioning color even useful now
    now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.
    That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
    that the sun can do this to everything inside
    the broken light refracted through leaves.
    What the ancients called peace, no clearer example
    what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.
    Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike
    the sun touches deeper than thought.

    O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing
    to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.
    There might be nothing greater than this
    nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within
    like in the middle of the flower I call your name.
    To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff
    to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint
    father, and further, the migration of things.
    The homing action of geese and wood mice.
    The ample evidence of the sun inside all life
    inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too.

    But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.
    The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity
    but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.
    The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun
    at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.
    The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside
    and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that
    the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time
    in the time of pictures and refracted light.
    Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night
    the animal proximity of another and of nigh.

    To step into it as into a large surf in late August
    to go out underneath it all above and sparkling.
    To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
    wondrous and strange companion to all our days
    and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.
    The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light

    the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers
    to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing.
    The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it
    the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
    these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge.

    Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.
    To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane
    and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.
    The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression
    making so much more of itself here than where it signals
    the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing.
    Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing
    though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it
    that nothing at the center of something alive and burning
    green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet
    into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone.

    But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar
    the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling
    what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line.
    To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.
    The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever
    the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint
    into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight.
    That light was my enemy and one great source of agony
    one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.
    The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear
    the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun.

    The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun
    the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear
    one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.
    That light was my enemy and one great source of agony
    into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight
    the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint.
    The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever.
    To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.
    What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line
    the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling
    but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar.

    Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone
    green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet
    that nothing at the center of something alive and burning
    though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it.
    Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing
    the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing
    making so much more of itself here than where it signals.
    The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression
    and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.
    To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane
    now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.

    These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge
    the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
    the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it.
    To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing
    the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers.
    The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light

    and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us
    wondrous and strange companion to all our days.
    To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
    to go out underneath it all above and sparkling
    to step into it as into a large surf in late August.

    The animal proximity of another and of nigh.
    Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night
    in the time of pictures and refracted light
    the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time
    and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that.
    The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside
    at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.
    The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun
    but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.
    The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity
    but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.

    Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too
    the ample evidence of the sun inside all life
    the homing action of geese and wood mice
    father, and further, the migration of things.
    To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint
    to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff
    like in the middle of the flower I call your name.
    Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within
    there might be nothing greater than this
    to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.
    O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing.

    The sun touches deeper than thought
    leaves shine in the body and in the head alike
    what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.
    What the ancients called peace, no clearer example
    the broken light refracted through leaves.
    That the sun can do this to everything inside
    that the sun can do this to us, every one of us
    now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.
    Nor is questioning color even useful now
    nor to imagine answers would be the only destination
    to not be naive and think of silly answers only.

    Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection
    heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty.
    Or if you can indeed hear what I might say
    O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
    the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree
    this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision.
    Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
    saying, who and how am I made better through struggle
    nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
    that we take our rest at the end of the grove
    is this what you intended, Vincent
.

CONJUNCTIONS:47, Fall 2007
http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm



Thursday, February 7, 2013

Alice Walker / Women


Women

by Alice Walker

They were women then
My mama’s generation
Husky of voice—stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.






Monday, February 4, 2013

Ann Lauterbach / Two Poems

Two Poems
by Ann Lauterbach
CONJUNCTIONS:53, Fall 2009

A  C O N T I N U E, OR  E N T R Y

1.
Where next? Oblique cost of the not yet.
Strange flotation of the stampede, resembling play.
The octagonal stop, characteristic, time is place.
Intentional rupture of the flow.
Play coming upon belief, instruments, kin.
Kindred bricks or blocks, the hallucinating margin.
Then: double vision, a skill contained by doing.
A refusal to embed that into this, so that this perishes.
A spread or insistence, as in a flood.
A local extremity, a wall.
Extent and its delimiting edge.
Elaboration sprouting form, its voraciousness.

2.
What next? Unique cruelty of the undone.
Rook rhymes with book, crow with toe.
Also hook. Also know.
To countermand restlessness, settle on fact
as it seeks to order a well-worn shoe, two
shoes, a pair of old shoes. And yet
the sun lays claim to
natural dyes, rifts through the glow-torn
phenomena where I see
the metonymic rituals of spring
expose a mournful goddess in her crypt.
Hook rhymes with crook, know with foe.

3.
Strange flotation of the stampede, resembling play.
Rumble, blaspheme, crooked under the gun.
Too much is previous. Even the game,
about to start, will vanish
with its partner, day. Reach out your spoon
for another portion; arch your neck.
Everything is in profile toward evening.
If, on behalf of a last chance, you move
Yours sincerely into the winning slot, then
cherries, stars, and the quick weave of your
hair into braids: all this shall be yours.
These are lessons of chance. They are not plans.

4.
The octagonal stop is my master.
I was thinking of roaming out of range
to where a sidelong pillar of light
rides the river sky. Wow! If I turn away
toward an unmarked grave
(here find the stop where the real is done)
will you believe if I say
something gains on our aspiration, our embrace?
Branches against cloud. Fence against road.
Above the shade, the elastic flirtation of a web.
Words in another room, if the radio were on.
These are lessons in mobility. They are not fate.

5.
Intentional rupture of the flow,
blurry, as in a Vermeer. You, who may
not have seen such reproductions of the same,
missed the optical illusion which,
as it happens, is rhetoric at its best.
He saw how materials collapse
a desire for reality’s articulated shield.
The Dutch love the small, domestic stage.
I love the huge impertinence
of an unresembling fact. Look!
A deep pink developing above, there,
in the west! It cannot be saved.

6.
Play touches belief, sorts out, finding kin.
Could be time to count. Ten, five, three
as if pointing toward severance,
the throw of the dice.
Looking back, there seems to have been a hive
or bank in which things were kept,
a hoard or list or will. In the philosopher’s tale,
there are bitter claims at stake;
in the great attic, increasing remorse.
Dearest, I visited your room after you
were gone and found the
and the the and the the and the.


7.
Kindred plays or blocks, the hallucinating
margin above mementos of—
a supplemental neuter deletes
some revenant’s luck. Her.
I dream the awkward dream. I disallow.
On the rug, with paint and trowel,
under stones and ash and the rude
vocabulary of the frost, grammar
disobeys its rules. The western crawl space.
Air and earth aglitter, collide.
Something adds, something subtracts.
How near is the thing that counts, what is it called?


THE TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA

As if to foretell an ordinary mission, with fewer words.
With fewer, more ordinary, words.
Words of one syllable, for example.
For example: step, or sleeve.
These are two favorites, among many.
Many can be found if you look closely.
But even if I look closely, surely a word is not
Necessarily here, in the foreground.
I see an edge of a paper, I see orange, I see ear.
I see words and I see things. An old story,
Nothing to foretell in the ordinary mission.
I see “her winter,” and I see “I am merely
A tourist here.” Are these issues of
Translation, the barriers of translation?
I see John and an open book, open to a day
In August. I am feeling defeated
Among these sights, as if I will never find
Either sleeve or step. These ordinary
And pleasurable words, attached to
Ordinary and pleasurable things, as if
To announce them I am
Announcing certain criteria. The step, the sleeve,
How they invite hovering over and within
Our necessities: a coat, a stair.
But I am merely a tourist here, deaf to light.
What is this wreath? What is this thing?
Nothing to foretell the ordinary, its leap across


http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm



Friday, February 1, 2013

Mark Strand / With Only the Stars to Guide Us

Mark Strand, Almost Invisible
photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders



Mark Strand, “With Only the Stars to Guide Us”

Whenever the giants turned in for the night, taking their huge toys with them, we were left nothing to play with, and slept under sofas and chairs. The gift of bigness would never be ours. This was a truth against which we had tried again and again to turn our tiny backs, and each time had failed. Undone by sorrow, some of us found solace in prayer, and others, like ourselves, chose to follow wild dogs through the dark, moose-crowded woods of the northland, nursing our hurt until we dropped.
Almost Invisible is a collection of short prose poems by former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand published at the beginning of 2012. It collects works from, among other publications, Slate (“The Engima of the Infinitesimal” and “Every So Many Hundred Years Hence“), Little Star (“The Students of the Ineffable” and “The Triumph of the Infinite”), and Poetry (“Futility in Key West,” “Mystery and Solitude in Topeka,” “No Words Can Describe It,” “The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish,” and “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter“).
Oh, and five poems in Boston Review, where Nicholas Christopher praises Strand for his “clean lines, taut narratives, and carefully framed mise-en-scènes.” I’d add only that they have for me the surreal specificity of dream images—sharp, distinct tableaux of things that shouldn’t quite fit together yet somehow do, and in doing so impress themselves upon your memory.
http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/3/